Human capital and collective political events

This dissertation explores the relationship between human capital,employment, and political activity. The first chapter studies thesubject from a theoretical point of view, describing howunderemployment of educated agents can lead to inefficient economicpolicies and political conflict due to increasing political instability.The second chapter presents empirical evidence of the positiverelationship between human capital and the number of political massevents. The analysis is performed using a new dataset that covers thefirst-level administrative subdivision of several African countries andincludes data on political activity, employment status, political andeconomic perceptions and expectations, and economic performancefrom sources such as ACLED, Afrobarometer, PRIO-grid project,Penn-Tables, and ILO. The identification strategy uses national levelshocks to address endogeneity issues at the regional level. The lastchapter investigates the relationship between higher education andpolitical violence, focusing on the intensity of civil conflicts and thenumber and effectiveness of terrorist groups at the country level. Thestatistical analysis supports the hypothesis that, everything else equal,countries with larger stocks of human capital suffer from more intensecivil conflicts and the presence of more numerous and effectiveterrorist groups.